Comment by Don McCanne
When explaining
that health care reform seems to be moving backwards, does it improve
communication to discuss reform that is sdrawkcab (ananym of backwards)?
NYT’s
Elisabeth Rosenthal has provided us with another great article that
describes how some of the supposedly forward advances in reform are
really backwards. The ACA exchange plans are undoing some of the
financial protection that health insurance should afford us, while
impairing access through narrower provider networks. If we said that
this reform is sdrawkcab, would that help us understand it better?
As
small business owner Amy Moses stated, “Anyone who is on these plans
knows it’s a two-tiered system.” Does it not seem absurd that the
policies inherent in ACA would place a business owner in the lower tier
of a two-tiered system? Isn’t that sdrawkcab? Yes and no. Actually what
is sdrawkcab is that we would even have tiers in our health care system
when it would be much more efficient, more equitable, and more effective
to have a single high level system for everyone - an improved Medicare
for all.
A specific example of the wrong
direction in which too much of our policy is headed is provided by the
new CMS rule that describes yet another technical reason to prohibit
individuals from obtaining coverage through special enrollment periods.
Although health reform supposedly was designed to expand access to
insurance plans, this rule is sdrawkcab in that it prohibits access for
certain uninsured individuals. True, the rule was designed to protect
insurers from individuals who might have an acute need for coverage
outside of the open enrollment period, but the entire system should have
been designed to automatically enroll everyone instead of ignoring
individual needs while providing insurers with their optimal business
model.
No more sdrawkcab reform. Everybody in, nobody out!
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